November 27, 2012

The difference

Is that McDonald’s ‘I’m loving it’ slogan does correspond to attempts to make their food taste good, via high salt, fat and sugar contents, while the ‘New Zealand: 100% pure campaign corresponds to us filling our rivers with shit and trying to turn the countryside into open cast mines.

If the ‘I’m loving it’ campaign operated on the same level as the ‘New Zealand: 100% pure’ campaign, McDonalds would put chunks of jagged metal in all their burgers and regularly tear-gas their diners, and I guess their CEO could defend that by explaining that ‘I’m loving it’ was a little like New Zealand’s tourism slogan . . .

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A fundamental difference about these two ‘products’ may be while protesting against one might save you from a hastier death from a heart-attack, protesting against the other might mean you get to live out your enhanced life-span with no state pension, and very few of the rest of the population under the age of forty. . .

Do I need to point out that was two words, ‘petronius’. My apologies if i pushed the boundaries of polite debate. I was going for ‘provocative’, and perhaps succeeded. At least I didn’t tear-gas anyone! Thanks.

Danyl, you know not to directly make fun of John Key. His cult like following amongst the weak minded means doing so just gets his fanboys into a lather. From Mark Unsworth to Chris Finlayson to John Key, this government is incredibly thin skinned and aggressive on the 100% Pure disaster they’ve presided over when it comes to our image abroad. In four short years we’ve gone from 100% Pure, Kyoto loving, fighting for the whales NZ led by a prime minister who had considerable respect abroad to a mine it drill it pump it mentality worthy of the height of the settler greed of the 19th century, a 100% sewers for rivers, Kyoto freeloading, Maui dolphin extinctions outfit led by a prime minister who even his fanboys admit is a complete lightweight clown (that is apparently his attraction).

Sanctuary wrote: “In four short years we’ve gone from 100% Pure, Kyoto loving, fighting for the whales NZ led by a prime minister who had considerable respect abroad to a mine it drill it pump it mentality worthy of the height of the settler greed of the 19th century”

Spoken like a true Labour supporter. As a true Green supporter, I have to call bullshit on it.

Helen Clark may have pretended to be ‘Kyoto-loving’, but she actually presided over New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions increasing faster than those of any OECD country except Canada. The worst increases in river pollution also happened under her watch.

“led by a prime minister who even his fanboys admit is a complete lightweight clown (that is apparently his attraction).”

Thats not true. At the time of the 2008 election NZ rivers were pure, dairying was a romance industry, the dolphins were plentitudinous, CO2 in our atmosphere was low and falling rapidly, there was no opencast mining sores spotting the land and unicorns frolicked in the balmy sun.
But just a day after the 2008 election John Key changed all that to the toxic wasteland you describe above.. he’s clearly no lightweight!

I ahve to disagree on your bleak assesssment of Labour’s environemntal record. How quick we forget the implacable fanaticism of farmer and business opposition to ANY measure to slow CO2 emissions. And the boom in dairying and subsequent pollution issues only slowly came onto the political radar in Labour’s time in office.

100% Pure was never true, but under Labour at least we were in Kyoto, ECAN wasn’t a dictatorship designed to plunder the public water resources of Canterbury for the profit of dirty dairying, the RMA wasn’t viewed as a ludicrous handbrake on the right to pillage the our shared natural environment for private profit, and the government wasn’t bending over backwards to facilitate extractive industries that despoil the landscape, and to CO2 emissions and return a pittance to New Zealanders.

The reason Key and co are so sensitive over the big lie that is 100% Pure is they know even the cursory scrutiny would reveal the yawning gap between what they say and reality of practically everything National has done in power. And that yawning gap worries them because they know the big lie cannot be contradicted anywhere if it is not to collapse, and they know how much value New Zealanders place on the environment and they know they can’t control the debate on the BBC and CNN and in the Telegraph and NY Times and in the Guardian and SMH by refusing to be interviewed by them.

National have been careful to only slowly raise the temperature on the environmental frog in the hope that by being sneaky, lying, and manipulative they’ll be able to fundamentally alter the environmental landscape to benefit their favoured cronies without anyone noticing. The 100% Pure debate has the potential to bring to the attention our environmental record to journalists who are not afraid of not getting an invite to the PM’s Xmas cocktail party.

@swan
You do know that Tourism NZ’s website and advertising (apart from the middle-earth crap) is largely all images of National parks, forests, birds, dolphins and whales, and people doing “extreme sports” in such a vista. You think that implies nothing about the state of the environment?

NZ has been advertised on the basis of its “untouched” environment as far back the New Zealand Company of the 1830s.

It is 100% Pure New Zealand – i.e. you will get a genuinely New Zealand experience if you come here.

If you mean by this ‘By coming to NZ you can experience 100% of these things in NZ’ then you are correct.

However, if you mean visitors will be to sample the delights of the genuine New Zealand experience, that would mean they would probably have to take a low wage, soul destroying job in the service sector, be saddled a crippling student debt, and be feverishly scraping the cash together for a one-way ticket to the Gold Coast.

the thing about branding is that it only really works if you live up to your brand. for those who see “I’m lovin’ it” as a reflection of their experience at McDonalds the branding has worked. For the rest of us their brand is a tatty, greedy frontage for a profiteering, exploitative industry that is causing all kinds of ecological and environmental damage and gets no love of any kind (perhaps the odd nostalgic memory of the playgrounds).

If we want to brand ourselves as 100% pure then we either need to be seen to be striving to live up to it and leading the way in environmental protection and restoration or try to lie and hope that not too many people see through it. Trouble is, if your brand is a lie and enough people find out it has a hugely negative effect so if our government’s strategy is to brand ourselves falsely (and it does seem to be DOC, environmental reporting, RMA and etc & etc…) then we all have to help keep their secret.

I propose we stop flying people into Auckland where they are immediately confronted with Auckland’s most industrial areas – divert them all to Queenstown. We need to ensure that all visitors to our shores are never exposed to water quality warnings, or any of our mines. And it goes without saying that all contact with international journalists be channelled through Crosby Textor, not some scientist who does not understand media comms strategy. This is a matter of national brand security! Do your part!

I’m not sure who exactly takes this sort of PR at face value. Pretty pics of mountains and lakes are de rigor for most countries and I doubt anyone believes no mining occurs in the US or Canada.

It does however leave us open to American writers rubbing our noses in it. Although walking past the bookshop I caught The Guardian headline “Cheap US energy will change the world”. It might be fun pointing the finger at NZ but there’s bigger issues out there.

We’ll get picked on for the hypocrisy around the whole environmental message. Clean and green does not compute with denying Kyoto, fracking, mines that explode due to inattention, extinction of dolphins etc.

We’ll get picked on for the hypocrisy around the whole environmental message.

I doubt any German tourist turns up at Auckland Airport and exclaims “They’ve got light industry, I’m on the first flight back to Frankfurt”.

NZ’s in the international media at the moment and there’s bound to be people looking for negative angles. I don’t envy Key trying to defend the ridiculous 100% Pure PR but as PM he’s bound to to defend NZ from overseas critics and that NYT wan’ts exactly mistake free.

I agree Neil. My point is that if we want to market our point of difference as being our environment then it would behoove us to stay on the leading edge of environmental stewardship efforts, not doing our very best to weaken every legislated protection we have, underfund the DOC and cease proper long-term, cohesive reporting. If we did those things while claiming purity we would be rightly seen as hypocrites.

Which devalues our reputation on the global stage and weakenss our political influence.

So far this government has done nothing but “vandalise” our brand as they say in the corporate world of thought control. On the plus side our new “100% pure bullshit” campaign is certainly working:

My point is that if we want to market our point of difference as being our environment then it would behoove us to stay on the leading edge of environmental stewardship efforts, not doing our very best to weaken every legislated protection we have, underfund the DOC and cease proper long-term, cohesive reporting.
This, this and this.
It’s really not that hard. If they want to be weak on environmental protections for economic reasons then they either need to have Tourism NZ take a different campaign tack or realise that the campaign will get called out for being greenwash bullshit.
If they continued to show a geniune balance towards positive environmental standards and protections etc then 100% Pure might still get some shit for not being representative but at least our overall stance would be attempting to support it rather than undermine it…

@24 – can you point to how the government has not continued to show a genuine balance to environmental standards – because the RMA is still intact etc etc? And our carbon emissions have reduced (give thanks to the global fin crisis). And no there is no international agreement on carbon/climate change so Kyoto tinkering doesn’t mean anything for New Zealands ecology. Maybe the govt is not doing what you want it to be doing but thats a different story to weaken every leg protection we have etc.

It is worth noting that the report used by Mike Joy for our 18th worst standing isn’t because of greenhouse gas emissions or water pollution, we are there in part because we have lots of endangered species a factor attributable to our relatively late discovery (by Maori and Pakeha) compared to the rest of the world which had plently of time to have already knock off their most vulnerable species.

This episode is another variation on the statement lies, damned lies and statistics.

This whole debate illustrates the difference between absolutes and relative. Relative to the rest of the world NZ Inc ™ is considered externally as 100% Pure (based on perceived isolation, imagery, culture, relative emptiness etc). On an absolute level no place in the world is 100% environmentally pure – in part because of the ongoing moving definition of what purity is, and simply because its an absolute statement. So we end up with people making “no true scotsman” statements which can easily be made because they will be at the absolute level. Absolutely we have some polluted rivers but equally we also have some of the worlds purest water. Relative to the rest of the world we provide a 100% pure experience – and thats the marketing angle.

My point is that if we want to market our point of difference as being our environment then it would behoove us to stay on the leading edge of environmental stewardship efforts, not doing our very best to weaken every legislated protection we have, underfund the DOC and cease proper long-term, cohesive reporting.

This, this and this +1

We are told that National is the party of business. Well any business leader knows about the value of brand protection so taking actions such as the above which undermine that brand are inconsistent with brand protection and just bad business. Politicians also know about personal brands – once tainted it’s almost impossible to recover. In that context given how much National relies on Brand Key it’s just a bit strange that hey seem unable to make the conceptual leap to understand that if tourism promotes a “100% Pure” image then actions undermining that image will have negative consequences. Instead they’d rather engage in semantics and shoot messengers.

“I think Nationals disregard for the environment is a bit overstated. ”

…what. I’m just going to assume you pay no attention whatsoever to any media.

For a handy factual visual, check http://wheresmytaxes.co.nz/ and try and find the DOC budget.
(cheat sheet: it’s 0.92% of the total budget, down 8.4% from last year – which was after previous years of cuts)

This whole debate illustrates the difference between absolutes and relative. Relative to the rest of the world NZ Inc ™ is considered externally as 100% Pure (based on perceived isolation, imagery, culture, relative emptiness etc). On an absolute level no place in the world is 100% environmentally pure – in part because of the ongoing moving definition of what purity is, and simply because its an absolute statement. So we end up with people making “no true scotsman” statements which can easily be made because they will be at the absolute level. Absolutely we have some polluted rivers but equally we also have some of the worlds purest water. Relative to the rest of the world we provide a 100% pure experience – and thats the marketing angle.

Statements like “Relative to the rest of the world we provide a 100% pure experience” are nonsense. But that’s where people get themselves trying to defend this slogan. By trying to trade on a perception of “100% pureness” Tourism NZ have opened us up to the sort of criticism made recently. It’s a dumb slogan.

“Lee C are you saying that the only way to farm is to degrade the environment to a point were you can no longer farm? It has been tried before without much success.”

[Yes Doug, I think it is a great idea to strip the land of its nutrients so that eventually people starve to death. I think you might have been implying that this has been tried before with great success, if indeed the aim was to do that. However, I’m not a monster – I’d encourage death-squads to wipe out the obese, but know deep down we’d only be prolonging the inevitable.]

“Alternatively are you saying that if dairying was required to comply with standards that maintained good water quality there would be no dairying at all in NZ?”

[yes, I think that we shouldn’t stop at the Canterbury Plains, Deforest the whole country, I say, and pay farmers a bonus if they can find a way to get the cow-shit directly into the water-supply. In fact, we might be able to use the obese for this purpose, as a humane alternative to executing them. We could make strong ‘shit-racks’ and they could sit on them and poop straight into the flowing effluence below.]

“Or are you implying that the only thing we can productively do with the land is dairying and that in a food constrained world we can’t make a buck growing something else?”

[Yes, definitely. I’ve put quite a lot of thought into this, and I’m pretty much 100% sure that the only way forward is to turn all of New Zealand over to Dairy, strip the land of all its nutrients and pour as much shit in the water as bovinely possible. I also think we aren’t using enough hormones, antibiotics and fish-meal to feed our cows. I can’t even detect a hint of fish-taste in the milk these days. Other crops are historically proven to be a crap idea.]

I gotta say Doug, if you were are being satirical, well, bang! Ya got me cold.

Thooop!

Like an arrow to my heart.

But if you were serious, this was a red letter day. Usually I only get asked the odd stupid question every three months or so, but yours were like red buses.

Yes I was being satirical, but it was in response to your first comment which I inferred meant that you considered dairying a necessary an unavoidable evil if we wished to have a safe retirement. My point was that there are alternatives both within the dairy industry and in farming generally.

i’s a bit difficult to know how to rank these various international rankings.

The NYT has us as the 18th worst country environmentally and Dr Joy has us as in the bottom half. So pretty bleak.

But in contrast the Yale Environmental Performance Index 2012 has us at 14th best. So considerably better.

But even then if one digs a bit it gets a bit less clear.

That same index has us slipping massively to 50th in terms of improvement. That’s not good. But Switzerland, in 1st place in the straight rankings, falls even further to 89th. So are we better or worse than Switzerland over all?

One of the main difficulty I see with the trend rating is that if one starts off well then the improvement tends to be small so resulting in a lower score. If one already scores 100/100 for water quality as it effects humans then the improvement score is 0. Which is the case for NZ.

It’s a bit like comparing our carbon emission progress with a country such as Germany. Their rate of improvement has been high but that’s because of a low base line. Germany has increased markedly the proportion of sustainable energy. NZ would compare badly because we already have a very high proportion of alternative energy and have had for quite some time and indeed we have been a pioneer in geothermal energy exploitation.

Not lack of intent – more lack of political imperative wrt environmental matters (i.e it indicates that the Swiss federal government consider other things relatively more important than keeping pace with other countries environmental improvements in order to maintain their global position).

That could mean that the Swiss government is satisfied with their position as opposed to undermining environmental efforts.

they’re two different rankings. How do know that Switzerland’s trend ranking being different form their absolute ranking is due to political intent? It could be due to a number of other things, it’s based on just two relatively poor performances

it could be political intent but that’s not an inference one can make from these rankings. But that is the sort of conclusion people are coming to and I don’t think its valid.

I’m making the inference because it appears to me to be the most logical.

If a state’s relative ranking improves – assuming that that the global trend is generally positive – then it means one of 2 things: a state is spending more and actively encouraging via regulation a mode of maintaining / improving their envronmental position vis-a-vis competitors or alternatively, everyone above them on the scale has slipped. The opposite holds true if a rgiven state’s ranking slips.
Given that he Swiss have dropped from number 1, the only conclusion I can draw is that the Swiss are either (a) satisfied with their standards and/or (b) have bigger fish to fry.

Wrt to your 100/100 position – I don’t believe this exists as there can be no measure of environmental perfection. The benchmark is constantly changed by technological advances and regulation. I do agree though that it is implicit that once the ‘low hanging fruit’ of improvement is addressed, a much higher degree of marginal investment is required (particularly is the technology to implement that change is experimental / leading edge). This goes back to my position that the Swiss government are likely to have performed that political cost-benefit analysis and are satisfied with their absolute as opposed to relative position.

“Germany has increased markedly the proportion of sustainable energy.”
Hmm, so you haven’t heard about how Germany is switching to coal as they shut their nuclear power stations down in the wake of Fukushima? And that due to increasing destabilisation of their grid, they have called a halt to any more wind power?

Wow, two tribes have gone to war here. There can’t be many statisticians here, though, as folk are arguing about the comparison between dubious attempts to rank how green countries are. Seriously?

“The NYT has us as the 18th worst country environmentally and Dr Joy has us as in the bottom half. So pretty bleak.
But in contrast the Yale Environmental Performance Index 2012 has us at 14th best. So considerably better.”

May I suggest you read what proxies these studies have used in order to get to these rankings?

And don’t forget the Happy Planet Index, where they somehow combined life expectancy, surveyed measures of happiness and “ecological footprint” (I’m still trying to get my head around how they measured that footprint, but it seems to boil down to “high GDP bad, low GDP good” even though in low GDP countries they tend to cut down trees (when animal dung is not available) to burn in open fires indoors, whereas in higher GDP countries we use electricity from hydro or nuclear, even some wind or gas.)

I am indeed aware. I was outlining why I’m sceptical of these sorts of bald comparisons – they strip out a lot of such detail that I believe one needs to make judgement calls about who is doing better or worse.

True Phil! And some professor says that the newspapers were biased in favour of one candidate over another and another and another at the last election and reportedly claims “the Labour Party have grounds to complain”. (Presumably because Goff got more coverage than Mr Peters?) She wasn’t reported has having concluded that sitting PM might get themselves in Newspapers more than non-sitting Prime Ministers, presumably because she forgot to compare the last election coverage with coverage of past elections. But that probably would have required too much work/was outside the client’s terms of reference?http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/about-massey/news/article.cfm?mnarticle_uuid=48735398-FC90-8334-7A51-09FCFDB95B7D

What passes for serious academic study now, eh? I’d laugh… if I wasn’t paying for it.